Free Marie Curie by Kathleen Krull Page B

possibly the first person to suffer from its effects. So sometimes she did admit its existence, but minimized its risks, viewing it as an annoyance, a hangnail instead of a death sentence. And so what if you had to put yourself in danger pursuing the noble cause of discovery? In her eyes, those who worried didn’t have a serious commitment to science.
    And no one else paid much attention to the question until 1925, when a young factory worker in New Jersey sued her employer after nine of her coworkers had died. They were dubbed “The Radium Girls.”
    The women painted luminous numbers with radium-based paint on the dials of the newly popular wristwatches. To get the finest point on their brushes, the women were instructed to lick them. As a result, they were ingesting tiny amounts of radium. Some weren’t affected, and some were—their teeth began to fall out, their jawbones deteriorated, the women weakened and died a painful death. At least fifteen women died at one factory before doctors finally began to realize that even a small amount of radium was highly poisonous.
    Today it’s a known fact that exposure to radiation poisons the body and actually causes cancer. It interferes with cell division, lodges in the bones, damages tissue, and creates abnormalities. Anemia and leukemia are frequently the results.
    As for Marie, she recommended feeding raw liver to anyone who fell ill. In her mind, the fact that she was still alive—after such prolonged contact with radium—meant other people’s lack of exercise and fresh air was the cause of their sickness. But she wasn’t the picture of health, and she knew it. For years she’d had numbness in her fingers and obsessively rubbed them with her thumb to restore sensation. Her hearing was going, there was a constant humming in her ears, she was nearly blind from cataracts, and she suffered from fatigue and other ailments she blamed on overwork. She rarely went to doctors, none of whom made the connection between her symptoms and radium. In any case, no treatment would have been available. After several suspiciously premature deaths at the Institute, she installed stricter safety rules—people had to wear lead shields and could not handle radium with bare hands—but didn’t follow them herself. Always, her messages about radium’s safety were mixed.
    Meanwhile, after her courageous war work and the achievements of her Institute, she became a heroine in France again. Even an icon. At a celebration in her honor at the Paris Opéra, all the notables in France thanked her for her contributions to science. The actress Sarah Bernhardt read “Ode to Madame Curie,” which called her a goddess. And in science circles, the reputation of her Institute was rising ever higher.
    Another thrilling achievement was the 1932 opening of a second Radium Institute, in Warsaw. Her own sister Bronia became its director.
    Every morning, a chauffeur drove Marie in a Ford (a gift from Henry Ford himself) to work. She continued to write books, swim, take snowshoe walks in the Alps to get the best views of sunsets. She was, at last, financially secure, and bought several vacation homes. Yet still, her most cherished time was working with Irène long hours into the night.
    So many more things she wanted to accomplish. “It is sad that one can’t be doubled,” she wrote toward the end of her life.

CHAPTER ELEVEN
    Genius Genes
    I N HER OWN daughter, Marie did produce sort of double.
    One day when Irène was a little girl, she electrified other children with an exact biological description of how babies were made. By the time she reached her teens, she was allowed to teach math and physics to her classmates.
    Already in Marie’s own lifetime, she was inspiring young women to think science. Irène was just one of the many who idolized Marie.
    When Irène was ten, Marie denied she was pushing her child into science: “She will be whatever she wants to be. All I ask of her right now is that she